LibriVox recording of The Complete Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1 of 2, in the public domain, read by Alan Davis-Drake.


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A collection of Wallace Stevens poems written before 1923.

Stevens trained to be a lawyer. Within eleven years after this series of poems were written, he was vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. He continued to pursue a quiet life of poetry and correspondence and for the remainder of his life he nurtured his contemplative habit of observation and writing as he walked from home to work and back again. Few at Hartford knew of his world acclaim as a poet. While his major work is considered to have been written when he was much older, many of these early poems are firm classics in the American poetic canon, including: “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and many others. Stevens died of cancer in 1955, shortly after receiving that year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

These poems originally appeared in a variety of magazines (Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.) Nearly 70 of the 101 published poems were later collected in Steven’s first published collection of poems, HARMONIUM.

(Summary by Alan Davis Drake)


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This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection
It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio

Artist/Composer: Wallace Stevens
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: librivox; literature; poetry; Alan Davis Drake

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Sayeth - - November 8, 2010
Subject: Free Listens Review
Alan Davis-Drake is a professional-sounding reader. He reads the words carefully, with an ear for pauses and emphasis. I particularly reccomend "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." For a review of this poem, along with other reviews of free audiobooks, see www.freelistens.blogspot.com